With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, unavoidable questions have arisen: what does this mean for Europe? What are the intentions of Russian President Vladimir Putin? Is there a risk of going to another world war?
“It is a moment similar to 1938 or 1938”, warns the renowned American historian Timothy Snyder, specializing in Central and Eastern Europe, during an interview with BBC Mundo in which he answered these and other questions.
The following is a summary of the telephone dialogue with Snyder, a history professor at Yale University and the author of books on Russia, Ukraine and World War II as “Lands of Blood”:
How would you define this moment for Europe in historical terms?
It is a moment similar to 1938 or 1939. It is a moment of being or not being. Do you have a system or do you not have a system? Do you have rules or don’t you have rules? Is everything possible or not everything possible?
The way Europeans have thought of themselves has been in opposition to the Second World War. I think, in a way, that’s over.
The Europeans, if they want to cooperate and have a kind of successful system, I think they will think at this point in the coming decades.
Do you agree with the idea that this is “Europe’s darkest hour” since the Second World War, as the Prime Minister of Belgium has said?
Certainly there are many terrible things that have happened to many peoples of Europe since 1945. And many of those terrible things happened inside the Soviet Union: mass deportations to the Gulag, for example, or deportations of entire national groups. All those things happened in the Soviet Union after the Second World War.
And of course the invasion of Hungary in 1200 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1200, also on the part of the Soviet Union, are quite obscure. I want to remind you that all of this is also Europe.
That said, I think this is the biggest challenge for Europe as a whole since the Second World War.
Why?
First, there has not been such a cynical attempt of abusing the language of European ethics and the European past, I think never.
The notion of invading a country with a democratically elected Jewish president and calling it “denazification” is a direct attack on the way in which that we try to use the past to guide us in our political ethics.
Second, although there have been conflicts in Europe since 1945, there was no case of a great power invading a small country without any provocation, with a pure aggression, as we have seen here.
And third, we know that Russia, under the current leadership of Putin, is not solely targeting Ukraine. We know that Ukraine is his most sensitive point, but that he has precisely in mind to undermine democracy and the rule of law on all sides.
In this sense, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, spoke of “a contest between democracy and autocracy”. Do you agree?
I think that is a very good way of putting it, specifically because Putin’s declared and explicit concern is to overthrow a democratically elected government and install an authoritarian government under his rule.
Biden said it differently, Putin said it from the opposite angle.
So, could this conflict define new lines for democracy in Europe?
I think so, of positive way.
The Ukrainians are the only ones who have died for Europe in the sense of the European Union: that was in 2014, the only people who died carrying the flag of the European Union, during the Maidan protests in Ukraine.
Now Ukrainians, soldiers and civilians, are dying in a war that is aimed directly at Europe.
The moral weight of that is something I hope other people will appreciate and assimilate over time. po.
I would also like to think that this moment in which some old disagreements between the countries of the West and even within countries, it is a moment that people will remember as one of cooperation and solidarity.
A moment in which we remember the value of democracy itself, which it is better to live in a free country and that free countries can really realize how important it is to live in a free country and do something about it.
I think that is a fair way of characterizing the cooperation of Western democracies today.
Many wonder about Putin’s motivations. Does history offer any clues to answer it?
The problem is that the closer you get to a perfect tyrannical regime, the more unpredictable it will be, since it depends more on only one person. Plato writes about this in The Republic and it was also a subject for Shakespeare.
Here we have a man who is aging, clinging to power and has been isolated for two years due to covid. And looking at his writings it seems that he is much less concerned with Russian interests, strategy or something like that, and much more interested in his historical reputation, in what kind of mark he will leave and in being remembered as a great Russian leader.
Those kinds of considerations are essentially imponderable for the rest of us.
Would you say, as Biden did, that Putin wants to “restore the old Soviet Union”?
I think all these comparisons are both true and false .
The thing about Putin is that he does a kind of mixture of the moments of the past, he takes what he likes from the medieval period, of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, puts it all together and calls it Russia.
I think he liked it It would be controlling the same territory that the Soviet Union controlled. But he would also like to imagine that he is the head of an empire. And at the same time, he would like to imagine that the Russia he rules dates back to 1.13 years ago, which of course is pretty silly.
So I don’t disagree with what President Biden said. Only I don’t think that Putin’s mind is limited only by the Soviet Union. I think it also has other types of fantasies and historical models.
Do you see the West reacting united enough , depending on the circumstances?
I think that, whatever we do, we have to think of the Ukrainians first. Regardless of the sanctions that we announce, we should also announce what we are doing for the Ukrainians: the refugees, the internally displaced, the Ukrainian state, its Army.
I think it is impressive how united it has been West. If we have a weakness it is that we tend to focus the conversation only on what we are doing about the Putin regime and do not think creatively enough about the ways in which we could help the Ukrainians.
Because now they are suffering, but it is also very important how they will remember this.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky he said they are “alone” and that “the most powerful forces in the world are watching from afar.” How do you take this?
First of all, I want to highlight the personal value of Volodymyr Zelensky.
In my opinion, he can say what he wants about the distant leaders, because he is right there in Kiev, and he knows that he is the target of this war. It is very possible that he will be captured and killed. And yet he is there. So he has earned the right to make those criticisms.
I think what he says is natural. Whenever you find yourself in this situation, you will feel alone. If you are a small country invaded by a big country, if you are a country with a small army invaded by a country with a huge army and you don’t have military allies coming to help you, of course you will feel lonely. I think that’s normal
AND a has responded to the way Putin justified his actions by saying that it is necessary to “denazify” Ukraine. But he also denied Ukraine’s statehood and claimed that Russian-speaking residents in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine are being subjected to genocide, without providing any evidence of this. How do you take these words, which are also reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Second World War?
Those are the themes of 675 and 1939.
When we remember Hitler, we tend to remember the war itself and the Holocaust, which is very important. And Putin has profaned that vocabulary.
But in 1938 and 1939, in the also very important preparation for the war, Hitler made the following argument: a neighboring democratic state is a creation artificial, it has no right to exist. The same thing that Putin says about Ukraine, Hitler said about Czechoslovakia.
Hitler used the argument, again completely fictitious, that his compatriots abroad they were suffering terribly and had to be rescued. In a very similar way, Putin talks about fictional sufferings of the Russian-speakers in Donbas.
Both make a false gesture towards diplomacy and then invade.
So it is surprising how the pattern is repeated, to the point that it almost seems like plagiarism.
Long before this crisis, Putin said that Russia and Ukraine are “one people”. Is there any truth to this in historical terms?
I can talk about history, but the main thing is to ask the Ukrainians. Surveys have been conducted and the vast majority of Ukrainians say that Ukraine is a separate nation from Russia.
The most important thing is what the people themselves think. Because even if Putin has a terrible historical interpretation and I have a decent one, even this is not more important than what people think of themselves.
As a historian I can say that nations are formed in a complex way, connected with other nations, that is normal. The emergence of the Austrian, Belgian or even Italian nation is complicated, like the history of the Scandinavian nations, all linked to each other but ultimately different societies.
Ukraine and Russia are connected , just like Ukraine and Poland, or Ukraine and Lithuania and Belarus are historically connected.
There are all kinds of links from the Middle Ages to the present, but there are also all kinds of differences between Ukraine and Russia.
Territorially Russia is a huge country, mostly Asian, something that Ukraine is not. Ukraine had a connection with all the big European trends. like the Renaissance and the Reformation, something that Russia did not have.
In the 17th century there was already talk of a kind of Ukrainian nation, something that does not happen in Russia. There was a Ukrainian national movement in the 19th century; there was nothing similar in Russia.
But the most important thing is how people imagine their future. A nation seems to be about the past, but it is really about the future: how a collective of people see what they will do together. And in that sense, it is absolutely clear that Ukraine is a separate nation.
Do you see a risk here escalating to the brink of a new World War?
Of course, I mean, historically speaking everyone is more comfortable with World War II and the War Cool, but this feels a bit more like the start of the First World War. Russia can be thought of as Serbia, making a land grab that affects the surrounding order. Or you can change the analogy and think that Russia is like Austria and China is like Germany, and that Russia is drawing a major power into a world conflict.
I think there is such a risk of escalation. There has to be that risk: every time a big war is started in the middle of Europe, something is risked. And the responsibility for that risk rests on the shoulders of one man: Vladimir Putin.
But, at the same time, I have been impressed by the way in which the Americans have been so moderate in their response.
I believe that the Biden administration, uniquely among US presidencies in recent 30 years, has recognized that we can do some things, but we can’t do everything. And they have thought in advance about the things they are not going to do because they are too risky.
This reflection of the Biden administration is something that makes me feel better about the risks of escalation.
Of course that a big difference, especially with the First World War, are nuclear weapons, so the risk is even higher for the entire planet, right?
I wouldn’t want to minimize the tens of millions of deaths from the two world wars, but of course that’s true .
At the same time, it does not mean that each country that has nuclear weapons can tell all the others what to do just because they refer to their nuclear weapons. That would not be a tolerable world either.
Now you can receive notifications from BBC World. Download our app and activate them so you don’t miss our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
-